sale of house query re: french doors

amjustagirl

silvercar wrote: »

I thought the significant date was April 2002. If so, I would be tempted to say that you understood they were installed prior to April.

I noted the wrong year i meant to say 2005, so am stuffed..wished i hadnt written it down now as they would be none the wiser huh

rileydog

You can see if a certificate was ever issued by entering house number and postcode here http://www.fensa.co.uk/asp/certificate.asp It gives the date of installation and date of cert issue.

That might be enough to appease buyers or you can get duplicate cert for £10+vat

G_M

Any reputable, FENSA, installer wil
a) tell you about the requirements and
b) issue one

Any less reputable non-FENSA installer will obviously NOT tell the customer about the requirements but will undercut the reputable installer's price.

If he told you, you'd turn down his quote and go to the FENSA installer!

Ultimately it is the home-owner's responsibility to comply with building regs.

hcb42

thanks for the link, just tried it for my property which I complete on this week, and details are there. am sure I just paid for insurance too, how come solicitors dont know this!

amjustagirl

Nothing came up in that postcode search

mrsmchapman

A Fensa cert is required from 2001, I'd never heard of it until a few days back when we were asked for one from our buyers. I've been told I will have to purchase an indemnity insurance if they go ahead, which is fine and of course a cost I have to pay. It's really not worth letting a sale fall through over, but yes when you first brought your solicitor should have checked this, however if the previous owner didn't state new French doors, who would have known to check. Being honest I could have said the windows in my house were installed in 2000, and I'm not sure how this would have been checked, but as it stands I will provide an indemnity, and hope the buyers accept this

[Deleted User]

I had new windows put in 5 years ago and the windows company I used never issued a certificate or informed FENSA. The company liquidated a couple of months after the windows were fitted around the same time as I tried to chase it up.

taxiphil

As G_M says, it's another example of the ridiculous pedantry that's becoming more common from buyers' solicitors and lenders. I've just been forced, as a seller, to pay for copies of original planning permission for my house - it's part of a Taylor Wimpey development and the buyer's solicitor already has copies of planning permission on file because they did MY original purchase plus numerous others on the same development!

So they are forcing the whole conveyance to be delayed by up to 2 weeks, and making me needlessly fork out money, when all they have to do is reach into their own filing cabinet and pull out a piece of paper. This is exactly what gives solicitors a bad name.

Add that to the fact that it's well beyond the statutory limitation period for the council to actually object to it, and it starts to look like a deliberate and vexatious creation of unnecessary work. It makes a mockery of the recent attempts by the Law Society to streamline and expedite the conveyancing process, which is still stuck in a different era.

I mean, do these solicitors honestly believe in their wildest dreams that the council are going to send the bulldozers round because of a stupid bit of paperwork about some French doors fitted 11 years ago?

AlexMac

Agree with all the comments above- having bought and sold several times in recent years, I've seen solicitors rachet up the requirements exponentially latterly, as if they've all been infected by 'risk averse virus'.

Lucky to get away with £21; recent local examples include vendors under the cosh to pay many hundreds of pounds for similarly pointless deeds, insurances, etc, such as a piece of paper to evidence rights of access over roads which local residents have used for a hundred years!

We've learned to be very careful what we tell solicitors- never lie, but sometimes ignorance is the best policy

andy.m_2

Local merchant should be able to rattle you a FENSA chit for a tenner or so.